Subscribe

Forum registrations are not automatically activated; please email us and we will manually activate your account. If you request a password change and do not receive a response, please
send us an email. More forum instructions are here.

Want to comment or talk? Please join in on the forum. But if you have a specific question or issue for Dwarven Forge, please ask us directly.
While we read the forum, we don’t catch everything and we want to give you an answer!

Forum members who have supported Dwarven Forge Kickstarters receive badges. KS6.66 badges have been posted for backers whose emails match their Forum email address and who have completed their pledges as of 11/1/2019. Click here to read more!

close

If you have backed current or previous Kickstarters and don't see the appropriate badges, please email us webmaster@dwarvenforge.com
and please include your Forum email address and username. We will update your account and let you know we've done it.

We automatically update badges for our current Kickstarter about 2 months after the Kickstarter ends based on a match between your Forum email and your backer email. If your Kickstarter email does not match your Forum email, or your order has not been completed at the time we do the update, we apologize that your badge will not be automatically activated. Please contact usand we'll fix it!

I built a large dungeon with lots of elevation yesterday (pics forthcoming!) and when I stepped back, quite a few things dawned on me.

This was the largest, tallest dungeon I'd ever built, looking like an actual fully realized space instead of simply a three-dimensional map. And as I looked at it, I realized that, the last time I felt this way was when I used the Castle Builder stuff.

And then I realized that CBS is FULL of pieces that would be useful for elevated DoD builds. The courtyard floors are large solid floors that can be placed on columns for elevation. The castle walls themselves are double high walls, perfect for keeping a level "ceiling" even as your floors drop to lower levels (place them alongside regular floors and the wall height will stay the same even as you transition to a higher floor - for even more perfect matching, use floors combined with DoD passage walls instead of regular walls on the higher level and the walls will still line up). The spacers, while I haven't measured, seem like they'd be perfect to give an extra inch of space along an elevated walkway - stretch out the landing for epic stairs, for example.

Sadly, I won't personally ever make use of these ideas. I just don't want to mix these sets. The color palette is different - castles tends distinctly blue. The material is sometimes different as well - Gorgonite is a more brittle, glossy plastic, and even the painted iteration looks different. Finally, the sculpts don't match.

I'd forgive the latter two points if it weren't for the color issue. I can overlook minor shading variations here and there - but the CBS stuff is just so much bluer, it stands out a mile. I was willing to forgive the bicolor castle battlement issue (that crenellations and battlements are more traditional warm-hued DF while the castle walls and floors are cooler hued) mainly because I had no other choice and once I got used to it, I could overlook it. But I don't HAVE to use CBS to build dungeons, so I'm not going to.

Still, for people who aren't bugged by these sorts of things - it's an issue to consider. I've been mixing my DF settings for years - not just building MBS taverns on top of dungeons that lead to catacombs, but mixing up MBS and dungeon pieces in a single room to create something funky, placing MBS in caverns for an early resin precursor to the ks6 Smuggler's Cove, putting ROTA ruins in a cavern. It's fun. But I tend to keep my CBS stuff separate for the reasons outlined above. It's all highly subjective though, and it's neat to notice that so many engineering elements of CBS snuck into DoD, with the great side effect that people who do have castle sets may find that they increase what they can do with their DoD.